


fear not

by ohliamylia



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-10-31 07:11:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17844803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohliamylia/pseuds/ohliamylia
Summary: Studies of angelic and demonic anxiety.





	1. Chapter 1

There was a rending crack, and a loud drumming, and Crawly was suddenly staring out into the night, which he had not previously been doing. What _had_ he previously been doing? He couldn't remember, exactly - he had slithered into the cave, ignoring the affronted angel, and had coiled up to dry and watch the rain fall over the late afternoon. There was some hazy middle bit, and now it was dark. Had he been sleeping? Adam and Eve had done that, to the initial alarm of both angel and demon, just sort of… stopped, for a while. Crawly wasn't sure he liked it. He was certain he didn't like the noises the storm was making, though, horrible, alarming things. Storms weren't people, they were phenomena, and so they couldn't be angry, but it was making a good show of it. Though maybe it was less the storm that was raging and more the Ineffable Power causing it.

A bright flash, this time, so close to blindingly divine that Crawly's heart nearly stopped, then beat twice as fast as the pattern repeated itself: a loud crack, a terrible rumble. _Someone_ was displeased.

“Must you make that sound?” a put-upon voice asked behind him, once the - thunder, that - had faded and all that remained was the hammering of fat raindrops over the Garden. Crawly curled tighter around himself, giving himself lead to turn and face the back of the cave and the damp angel sitting there, knees pulled sullenly under his chin.

“What sound?” Crawly asked, wondering if the angel really thought him responsible for the storm.

“You're hissing,” the angel insisted.

“Am I?” But as soon as Crawly spoke again he heard it, a scratchy growling under his words, almost indistinguishable in tone from the rainfall. “I am,” he marveled. “I hadn't meant to.”

The angel's eyes sparked a wide, pale blue, reflecting distant lightning, and Crawly was glad to see him jump, because he enjoyed to see the angel vexed, and not because he was relieved to see that the angel also feared.

And then the cave lit up as the flash, the crack, and the rumble all happened simultaneously, and _loudly_ , and Crawly experienced another moment of lost time. When he surfaced from this one he was wrapped haphazardly around the angel, who was also wrapped around him, in a stubbier, less serpentine way. He could feel the angel's pulse, featherlight and panicky under his skin.

“Yes, alright,” the angel said faintly, sounding both strained and vaguely, perfunctorily annoyed, “it's just weather,” but neither moved to dislodge the other.

“I was sleeping,” Crawly admitted, once they had both calmed somewhat. The angel looked at him sidelong, baffled.

“Were you? Whatever for?”

Crawly did not currently possess shoulders, and so could not shrug. He just sort of wiggled, a little. “Couldn't say. Didn't mean to.”

“Well I shouldn't like it,” the angel declared. “It feels… wasteful.”

Crawly wiggled again. “Demon.”

“Yes, I hadn't forgotten,” the angel said, cross in such a way that suggested maybe he had, for a brief moment. He wiggled the shoulders he did have, as if to dislodge the Serpent looped around him. Crawly opened his mouth widely.

The angel froze.

Crawly yawned.

Well, he copied the odd, swooping sound that Adam and Eve made before they fell asleep, because he wasn't entirely sure what yawning was, or why one did it, but he knew as well as the angel by now that it signaled sleep.

“Oh, it's coming on again,” he feigned, and tucked his head over the angel's shoulder, ignoring the spluttering _I say_ s and _how dare you_ s until they tapered off. When it thundered in the distance, they curled around each other a little tighter.

When the rain stopped, the angel was asleep, and Crawly left before he woke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that snakes can growl? I do, now, after researching snake sounds. It sounds like cat hissing


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A night, after.

Crowley enjoyed sleep. He liked _not being_ for a bit - especially at night, when the humans that were still awake got on with sin and vice just fine without him, but occasionally during the day as well, when _being_ simply became too taxing. Aziraphale had never understood his predilection, choosing instead to spend his nights reading, or encouraging the occasionally noctural virtue (Soho did have its share of night clubs, and they were, mysteriously, some of the safest and cleanest). 

Crowley had successfully tempted him into trying sleep a handful of times over the years, usually after some great calamity. Crowley would pry him from his task of tending to the wounded, or searching through the rubble, or handing out emergency supplies, masking his concern with the reasonable observation that of course these were very _good_ things to be doing, but wouldn’t the humans become suspicious if Aziraphale did it for thirty-six hours without a break, and remember that time during the Spanish Inquisition, and did he want a repeat of that? And Aziraphale would listen, and Crowley would sit by the bed, or he wouldn’t and Crowley would sit on him until Aziraphale allowed the fatigue of his corporation to catch up with him.

Aziraphale had tried sleeping recreationally, once, without the aid of bone-deep exhaustion due to some terrible event, and the next day he had seemed strangely shaken and quiet. Crowley suspected bad dreams, but Aziraphale had refused to comment. Aziraphale, Crowley reckoned, coped by not thinking about things too hard or too deeply, by not cracking the lid on the doubts that Crowley _knew_ he had as well, the questions perpetually left unanswered. Dreams had a funny way of digging repressed things up.

Crowley didn’t necessarily _like_ to think about that sort of thing, ineffability and _why_ s and all of that existential nonsense, but at least he acknowledged it. Aziraphale was considerably pricklier about doubt. Which, Crowley supposed, was understandable, when one was still trying to balance on the crowded head of a heavenly pin. Crowley had long since tripped off, and so was free to doubt as much as he liked. Actually, he doubted considerably more than he liked. Given the choice, he might’ve picked ‘here or there, y’know, when I’m bored’ instead of ‘overwhelmingly, in the darkest hours of the night’.

The expansive windows of Crowley’s flat, a gateway to humanity and life by the light of day, became a gaping, empty void at night, a blank slate upon which the afterimages of Crowley’s nightmares could play out. Embers and ash, charred bodies and coagulated blood. A flaming sword, guttering, extinguished in the chest of its wielder. A serpent, far from the battlefield, hiding in the branches of what had been an apple tree before it, too, burned. Adam, in the middle of it all, as gleeful as a child who had received a particularly violent video game for Christmas.

Crowley usually enjoyed _not being_ , except that he had recently come very close to _Not Being_ , and so his usual method of escape had instead become a dive headlong into a brand new doubt: not _what’s the whole bloody point_ , but instead _what if we hadn’t succeeded?_

Aziraphale answered on the first ring.

“Crowley?” he asked sharply, cutting through the frantic haze of Crowley’s mind, and Crowley wondered if he had been waiting for him to call. He felt guilt grip his heart. It said hello to the panic climbing in his throat.

“I,” he croaked, unable to summon any other words, aware distantly and hysterically that he was instead breathing heavily into the receiver.

“Set the phone on the nightstand,” Aziraphale instructed firmly, and Crowley did so, and heard a faint crackle of static, and felt warm arms envelope him as the bed dipped beside him.

He was briskly arranged into a position curled against Aziraphale’s front, head tucked under Aziraphale’s chin, and the darkness he found himself in was smaller, more manageable than the endless blackness outside the windows. While Aziraphale murmured assurances into his hair, Crowley worked the buttons of his waistcoat until he could turn his ear to Aziraphale’s chest, counting the heartbeats he heard. Each distant _th-thump_ loosened the vice in his chest by a turn, and by somewhere in the six-hundreds his breath had stopped feeling strained, the rushing sound in his ears was gone, and he became aware of the bottom of the spine of a book digging into his shoulder.

“Don’t let me keep you from your book,” he mumbled, and it was his turn to manhandle Aziraphale, pushing him onto his back so the demon could sprawl more effectively over him, and so the angel could rest the book more comfortably on his shoulderblade.

“We all have our methods,” Aziraphale tutted, turning a page, and Crowley could not truly begrudge him his preferred means of escapism. “For instance, I spent the evening researching.”

“Any,” Crowley stammered over the word that jumped to mind, “any revelations?”

Aziraphale’s mouth pulled into a line that was both grim and mildly amused. “Rather the opposite.” He closed the book and brought it forward so Crowley could see the title.

“ _Anacalypsis_?” Crowley read, trying to dredge up his knowledge of Ancient Greek prefixes.

“Discovery, or recovery, perhaps,” Aziraphale translated, waving a hand before resting it in Crowley’s hair. He set the book aside on the bed. “There’s some scholarly debate.”

“Huh,” Crowley said, and then, “huh,” as he wound his way more thoroughly over the angel, tangling their legs. “It’s an antonym.”

“Indeed,” Aziraphale said. And then, quietly, once Crowley had had settled his head on Aziraphale’s chest, “I’m just as lost as you, my dear.”

Crowley’s plants trembled a little, both in sudden fear and with the displacement of air as Crowley manifested his wings. They curled in around both figures, blocking out the great blackness beyond the windows, the austere emptiness of Crowley’s flat.

“Tell me about your book,” he whispered into their shared air, their private pocket of night, and he felt some tension in Aziraphale loosen, and he drifted comfortably as Aziraphale related the thoughts of a human struggling to understand it all.


End file.
